The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch

With The Thief of Auschwitz, Jon Clinch succeeds with an assured contribution that places his novel amongst the worthy memorials to a generation...
-Blog Critics

Synopsis

“The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.” So begins the much-anticipated new novel from Jon Clinch, award-winning author of Finn and Kings of the Earth. In The Thief of Auschwitz, Clinch steps for the first time beyond the deeply American roots of his earlier books to explore one of the darkest moments in mankind’s history—and to do so with the sympathy, vision, and heart that are the hallmarks of his work. Told in two intertwining narratives, The Thief of Auschwitz takes readers on a dual journey: one into the death camp at Auschwitz with Jacob, Eidel, Max, and Lydia Rosen; the other into the heart of Max himself, now an aged but extremely vital—and outspoken—survivor. Old Max has become a world-reknowned painter, and he’s about to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. Yet the truth is that he’s been keeping a crucial secret from the art world—indeed from the world at large, and perhaps even from himself—all his life long. The Thief of Auschwitz reveals that secret, along with others that lie in the heart of a family that’s called upon to endure—together and separately—the unendurable.

Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York, Jon Clinch has been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter, and an advertising executive. Teaching and advertising took him south to the suburbs of Philadelphia for many years, and only with the publication of Finn, his first novel, was he able to return to the kind of rural surroundings he'd loved from the start: This time, in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He is married to novelist Wendy Clinch, and they have one daughter.